Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

I am a high function ASD person in the late 60’s. I am a data scientist, artificial intelligence engineer, former high school science teacher etc. Needless to say, the term autism or ASD was unknown while I was growing up. The classic delay in speech (I did not start talking until I was almost 9 y.o.) and other characteristics were ascribed to some form of brain damage. Three causes were speculated: forceps delivery, German Measles at 18 months and the medication that my mother was give to keep from miscarrying (she had 6 miscarriages before me).

Today, I know that I was high risk because my father was 44 when I was born (Parental Age at Conception and the Relationship with Severity of Autism Symptoms. 2019). My childhood was not fun, because I understood enough about my situation that I was in terror for most of it. The terror caused me to work hard and I found success in a very non-social activity: mathematics and mathematics competitions. I placed in the top 3 repeatedly in both my Province and in Canadian Mathematics Competitions. That’s enough of my story.

Purpose of this Blog

Over the last few years I have became focused (the typical uber focus of an ASD person) on the microbiome to deal with family health issues. My primary focus has been on myalgic encephalomyelitis on which I have written some 1300 posts here. Out of that, I developed an analysis site using reference site and citizen science site called Microbiome Prescription. I have also became active in a Facebook group The Gut Club: Stool Test Discussion Group. This group had resulted in contact with many mothers with autistic children. Needless to say, I have both empathy for the mother and for the children (been there myself before there was support!).

This site is very open to guest posts. I do request that they be well researched with links to source studies. I hate to be ‘anti-social’ and ignoring chat-board opinions and consensus — but what do you expect from someone with ASD? 😉

As interesting notes comes across my desktop, I will explore and attempt to write up posts on what we know today.

I will start this blog by copying across some blog posts that I have done on Autism elsewhere.

Suggested watching and subscribing to: https://www.youtube.com/c/AutismResearchCoalition

A reader granted me permission to look at 12 microbiome reports on her daughter over two years. The source of the data is the same lab that I use, Thryve Inside. There are the blog posts below, followed by videos of me going over the same material.

• Technical Study on Autism Microbiome – comparing citizen science to published science. There is little agreement between published studies, but citizen science agrees with some published studies.
• Child Autism microbiome over time – Part 1 – Using the bacteria taxa identified above, we look at 11 samples over 2 years to see how these key taxa varied.
• Child Autism microbiome over time – Part 2 – We look at the predicted symptoms for each of these 11 samples and how certain bacteria cluster that are associated with autism
• End Products and Autism, etc – We look at citizen science identification of end product shifts associated with autism. Often the pattern is not too high Or too low BUT too high and too low — that is, out of balance
• Child Autism microbiome over time – Part 3 – we examine the end products over the two years and saw that Camel Milk with L.Reuteri made a significant change in the microbiome. A side effect was that Eubacteriaceae started to climb and kept climbing until it was very extreme. This bacteria produces formic acid which alters the pH of the gut and is hostile to many bacteria, including Bifidobacterium.